Heretofore, flimsy, light-weight garments such as hosiery have been manually packaged into light-weight, thin, plastic bags for distribution and sale. This procedure has entailed a manual folding or bundling of the hosiery followed by manually insertion of the bundled hosiery into a preformed pouch of plastic packaging film followed by a double folding or heat sealing of the opened end of the pouch. This has been a time-consuming and costly procedure.
More recently, machines, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,385,478, has been devised for folding and packing items of hosiery sequentially into a series of connected, pouch-like envelopes that are heat sealed and severed. Though such machines and procedures have bundled flimsy garments satisfactorily, they have not packaged them in a satisfactory manner. Their use therefore has largely been limited to automated bundling operations preparatory to manual packaging operations.
The primary reason for the just described use restriction lies in the fact that garments like hosiery have a surface that tends to cling to open tops of preformed pouches of film-like packaging material when gravity fed thereinto. Their light weight, irregularly packed configurations serve to aggravate this. It thus frequently occurs that the insertion of hosiery is incomplete which is to say that the hosiery is not gravity fed completely into a pouch. Again, this is not unexpected in view of the fact that bundled hosiery is very flimsy and yet offers subtantial surface resistance while at the same time the packaging material is also flimsy and difficult to maintain in a wide open top configuration at the time the hosiery is gravity fed thereinto. As a practical result, the above type machines have been primarily used only to bundle hosiery and to deliver the bundles to operators who then manually insert the machine-bundled hosiery into pouches of flexible packaging material.
It therefore remains desirable to provide a method and apparatus for packaging light-weight, flimsy garments such as hosiery that overcome the just described problems and limitations of the prior art. It is to the provision of such methods and apparatuses that the present invention is therefore primarily directed.